Bainbridge Island inventor of the waterbed banks on a wave of nostalgia
Erik Lacitis The Seattle Times 5 hrs ago 0illennials, the inventor of the waterbed has a message for you. Especially those of you living right here in the Pacific Northwest, like he does.
You need a waterbed.
Charlie Hall is 71 and a millionaire because of waterbeds and some of the other 40 patents he holds. (You know the Sun Shower, with the solar-heated bags that let you bathe when camping? That’s his.)
He’s planning on the waterbed making a comeback this spring.
“I don’t think a millennial has ever seen one,” says Charlie, as everyone calls him, about the invention he debuted 50 years ago at a “Happy Happening” art show in San Francisco.
“But I have this theory that it’s a Northwest kind of thing. I feel like a lot of us spawned in a waterbed.”
And so those younger types, “Maybe they want to visit the spawning ground.”
That first waterbed was called “The Pleasure Pit” because, as the oft-repeated sales pitch went in that groovy era, “Two things are better on a waterbed, and one of them is sleeping.”
Working with a good friend of his from the waterbed days — Keith Koening, president of City Furniture, with 16 stores in South Florida — he is about to test-market Waterbed 2018.
No more rigid frame that made them hard to get out of. Now there’s foam around the edges. New materials suppress the wave action that some customers didn’t like. Dual bladders allow each side of the bed to have its own temperature control.
But are we ready for Waterbeds 2.0?
See More
If history is to repeat, once again it’ll be that male customer who’ll plunk down the cash.
The ads back then sometimes featured women in slinky outfits, or no outfits at all.
By May 1970, Charlie Hall’s waterbed was featured in a Playboy magazine spread, in an issue that included a story on “The Fiery Feminists” and “An exclusive interview with William F. Buckley Jr.”
“I remember we had to do the bed in velvet, I think maybe green velvet,” remembers Charlie.
Subtlety was not part of the waterbed ethos back then.
Then waterbeds practically disappeared.
“Probably bad marketing,” says Charlie. “It got to be price wars. Retailers were presenting $99 specials and selling a very crappy product. It spiraled down from there.”
He does say that it was because of waterbeds that the mattress industry changed. It showed you didn’t have to settle for some rigid spring coil bed.
“Memory foam, pillowtop mattresses, all that stuff began to appear,” he says. “Look at the ads for the memory foams — they read like all waterbed ads.”
Now it’s a new day.
Fifty years later, don’t you think this could fit you, too?
Credit Longview Paper
Previous Topic
Index
